RAF bombing raids tried to goad Saddam into war - Sunday Times - Times Online

Well before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq the U.S. and Britain were routinely bombing Iraq. The Pentagon gave this effort little publicity and barring a tiny paragraph in a major newspaper mentioning that a radar sight that "painted" a U.S. or British plane had been bombed, the casual news reader would hardly even know about this low-key war. The context was the bilateral imposition of "no-fly zones", which justified British and U.S. patrolling. At various point, as when the Chinese sold Iraq fiber optic communications gear, which would enhance Iraqi command and control. the bombing intensified. The purpose of the bombing was to degrade the Iraqi forces, and as the following Times report argues to goad Saddam into reacting. Thus, well before George Bush made the decision to invade Iraq, a low-key war was well underway.
RAF bombing raids tried to goad Saddam into war - Sunday Times - Times OnlineTHE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.

The attacks were intensified from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war. By the end of August the raids had become a full air offensive.

The details follow the leak to The Sunday Times of minutes of a key meeting in July 2002 at which Blair and his war cabinet discussed how to make “regime change” in Iraq legal.

Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, told the meeting that “the US had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime”.

The new information, obtained by the Liberal Democrats, shows that the allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001, and that the RAF increased their attacks even more quickly than the Americans did.